jQuery Hack Attack in Seattle — Notes

Today, Amazon hosted a jQuery Hack Attack in Seattle. John Resig, jQuery creator, provided the keynote presentation and contributed one of the open talks. Below, I include notes on the keynote regarding jQuery mobile browser suppoort and the three sessions I attended.

John Resig ~ “I want to give developers the smallest toolset they need to build the best sites possible.”

jQuery Mobile: Notes from John Resig’s Talk

Mobile JavaScript gains increasing importance as more and more smartphones with JavaScript support are shipped to consumers. jQuery intends to support the most popular mobile web browsers and devices.

One difficulty when defining what browsers and devices to support is gathering data regarding mobile browser marketshare and version information. Large sites such as Yahoo! have this information, but have not released it to the public. Typically, these sites see the statistics as a competitive advantage and as a result have not released the data to the public.

Session: Data Linking

Presenter: @dharmabruceDiscussed: Microsoft’s Data Linking proposal for jQuery. Much planning has been done around the proposal, but the jQuery implementation has not yet been created.

Resig stated that absolute musts when adding this capability are the ability to create sites with progressive enhancement, and that the data linking functionality must be extensible.

Session: Templating

Presenter: Unknown (didn’t get his name)Discussed: Using HTML templates via jQuery. Current methods, Microsoft’s proposal, and drawbacks. Microsoft has a jQuery templates proposal. John Resig has been working on iterations of the proposal with them and hopes to see a final version make it into jQuery core with a point release of 1.4 or in 1.5.

Session: DOM API Improvements

Presenter: John ResigDiscussed: Resig discussed his proposal for adding new methods to the DOM API which would provide enhanced functionality. He is working with major browser manufacturers to gain acceptance before going through the complete W3C specification approval process.

Functions to be proposed:

querySelectorAll

scopedQuerySelectorAll

matchesSelector (implemented in Firefox and Webkit nightly builds)

filterSelector

Resig is working with the W3C on this proposal and hopes to see these DOM enhancements make it into browsers from all major manufacturers within the next 1 to 1.5 years.

Final Thoughts

I’m excited to see the work being done to continue improving jQuery. The library makes my life as a web developer easier and I expect it to continue improving.